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AP Photo/Charles Tasnadi, File President Nixon tells a White House news conference that he will not allow his legal counsel, John Dean to testify on Capitol Hill in the Watergate investigation and challenged the Senate to test him in the Supreme Court on March 15, 1973. Y ou might think Donald Trump was studying the Watergate tapes to see how best to recreate Richard Nixon’s crimes. On the June 23, 1972, tape—the one that, when its transcript was released, caused every Republican on the House Judiciary Committee to announce they’d vote to impeach Nixon, and which led, two weeks later, to his resignation—Nixon discussed with his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, how to get the CIA to call off the FBI, which was investigating who was behind the Watergate break-in. “The way to handle this now,” Haldeman told Nixon, “is for us to have [Deputy CIA Director Vernon] Walters call [FBI Director] Pat Gray and just say, ‘Stay the hell out of this, ah, business here, we don’t want you to go any...

Nito/Shutterstock trickle-downers_35.jpg I ncome and wealth don’t trickle down. Neither do health and longevity. Last week, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) released a report on the life expectancy of Americans, and what that means for Social Security. What the CRS reported is that just as economic inequality is increasing, so is lifespan inequality. For men born in 1930, for instance, 50-year-old individuals in the highest income quintile (the wealthiest 20 percent) could expect to live 5.1 years longer than men in the lowest quintile. For men born in 1960, however, 50-year-olds in the highest quintile could expect to live 12.7 years longer than men in the lowest. Apparently, all the advances in medical science and healthy living that occurred during this rolling 30-year interval were visited upon the rich a lot more than on the poor. It’s the same story for women. For those born in 1930, the lifespan differential at 50 between rich and poor was 3.9 years. For those born in...

AP Photo/Susan Walsh Former FBI Director James Comey. T here’s a very good reason why President Trump’s inner circle and his apologists have had trouble defending their chief’s firing of James Comey: Neither the stated reason for the firing nor the real reason is actually a prudent case to make if you don’t want to undercut the president—and, in the case of administration officials, if you don’t want the Donald to fire you, too. Suppose you defend the firing on the grounds stated in Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s brief: Comey trampled over Hillary Clinton’s rights when he trashed her last summer, violating Justice Department rules. Then he rode roughshod over those rules again when he announced the FBI was reopening the case last October. That’s a dicey case to try and defend when you land on CNN, because Trump applauded Comey’s October announcement. It only invites further discussion of whether Comey’s misdeeds actually, and unfairly, gave the election to Trump. Your boss...

AP Photo/Evan Vucci House Speaker Paul Ryan arrives in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Thursday, May 4, 2017, after the House pushed through a health-care bill. W ell, that was a first. Never before has a political party stripped millions of their countrymen of a socially guaranteed, life-preserving benefit. At least, never before has a political party done that to its own voters. The “fuck-you boys” (a pollsters’ term of art for voters who want to stick it to the establishment, and particularly to liberal elites) went big for Trump last November. Today, the fuck-you boys got fucked. The cuts that Paul Ryan’s handiwork would inflict on them through reductions in Medicaid and ACA subsidies would deprive millions of them of health coverage, were the Senate to pass anything like the bill that House Republicans passed today. The first version of the Ryan’s American Health Care Act would have deprived 24 million Americans of coverage over the ensuing decade, the...

AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais House Transportation Committee Chairman Bill Shuster speaks on Capitol Hill, where United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz testified on May 2, 2017. trickle-downers.jpg O n Tuesday, May 2, America’s airline executives were hauled before the House Transportation Committee to justify their businesses’ conduct to the assembled representatives of the American people and the flying public. At least, that’s what the Democratic members of the committee wanted to hear. The majority Republicans, however, were happy to cut the airlines some mega-slack. As Dana Milbank noted in The Washington Post , Republican members, led by Committee Chair Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania, happily parroted airline management’s talking points. The problem at the root of the airline passenger experience, they said, is that the airlines are overregulated. “I don’t believe in overburdening our businesses,” Shuster said, while adding the codicil that Congress might seek to add a few more...